Tag: regulation

A Feature, Not a Bug

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It appears that Facebook (and as an aside, Google, Amazon, IBM, and the rest of them) have been using the various foreign worker programs to pay their employees less,which is in direct conflict with the black-letter law.

The Justice Department on Thursday sued Facebook over allegations that it discriminated against Americans in the way it hired temporary foreign workers for thousands of well-paid positions.

The lawsuit contends that Facebook failed to properly advertise at least 2,600 jobs — and consider applications from U.S. citizens — before it offered the spots to foreign workers whom the tech giant was sponsoring for green cards granting permanent residence.

Facebook’s practices violated federal laws that require employers to demonstrate that there are no qualified U.S. workers available before it offers positions to temporary foreign workers it is sponsoring, the Justice Department said. The government sought unspecified monetary damages and other penalties against the tech giant for the alleged violations, which occurred in 2018 and 2019.

“Our message to workers is clear: if companies deny employment opportunities by illegally preferring temporary visa holders, the Department of Justice will hold them accountable,” Eric S. Dreiband, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, said in a statement.

Facebook said it could not comment on the now-pending litigation, but spokesman Andy Stone said in a statement the company had been cooperating with the Justice Department fully on its probe and disputes the allegations in the complaint.

………

Facebook, in particular, long has sought to expand the ranks of high-skilled foreign laborers in the United States, including programs such as the H-1B visa, as they aim to recruit the critical talent necessary to power their highly technical operations. Trump, however, has sought to restrict such programs in recent months — announcing in October, for example, new limits on the visas that later drew broad corporate blowback.

In its complaint, the Justice Department said Facebook has eschewed its traditional hiring process in cases where it wanted to hire an employee on an H-1B visa for a permanent position. When a temporary visa holder sought such a job, Facebook “diverged from its normal recruiting protocols,” according to the government, opting in some cases against “advertising the position on its external website.”

If a U.S. worker applied for one of these jobs — and Facebook determined they were qualified — the company appeared to hire them in a different capacity, the lawsuit found. Federal law generally only allows a company to sponsor a temporary worker for a permanent position in cases where there is no qualified U.S. applicant.

This is not how the system is SUPPOSED to work, but it is how it ACTUALLY works.

Notwithstanding claims to the contrary, the H1B and L1A programs are used to hire cheap, not hiring people with skills unavailable elsewhere.

This has been an open secret since at least 1982, when I was told by someone at what is now the Massachusetts DUA not to even bother applying.

Ajit Pai Does Something Right

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Well, knock me over with a sledge hammer.

The FCC has voted to take back about 75% of the spectrum that it allocated to the auto industry for self driving cars because:

  • It really can not work, because you cannot get deer to wear transmitters.
  • All the technology demonstrations have shown that you do not need anything near a full 75 MHz for this technology.

The automobile industry fought this tooth and nail, because they want to use the space to bombard drivers with advertisements, but the FCC unanimously voted to reduce the allocated bandwidth from 75 MHZ to 30 MHz.  

The intent is to reallocate the spectrum to rural broadband and the like.

Full press release after break:

Public Knowledge Applauds FCC Reclaiming Spectrum to Help Close Digital Divide

By  Shiva Stella   November 18, 2020, , , , ,

Today, the Federal Communications Commission unanimously adopted an Order reclaiming the 5.9 GHz spectrum band from the auto industry in order to help close the digital divide.

In 2004, the agency gave the auto industry 75 MHz of spectrum exclusively for “Dedicated Short-Range Communications” (DSRC) for the purpose of improving public safety. After 20 years of waiting for the industry to deploy DSRC, the FCC will phase out DSRC and replace it with a new, more efficient technology called C-V2X (cellular communication to vehicles (C-V2V) and infrastructure (C-V2I), collectively “C-V2X”).

Based on the record, the auto industry will require only 30 MHz of spectrum for collision avoidance and safety purposes. Rather than allowing the auto industry to use the remaining 45 MHz of free spectrum for commercial purposes such as location-based advertising, under this proposal the FCC will repurpose 45 MHz for rural broadband and next generation WiFi needed to support telemedicine and other high-bandwidth applications.

The 5.9 GHz band sits next to the existing “unlicensed” spectrum band at 5.8 GHz. Adding the 45 MHz to this band will allow existing equipment to support gigabit WiFi necessary for telemedicine, multiple education streams, and other valuable services. Furthermore, access to this additional spectrum will allow wireless internet service providers in rural areas to dramatically increase the stability and bandwidth of connections to the home.  

The following can be attributed to Harold Feld, Senior Vice President at Public Knowledge:

“Today’s FCC action is a win for closing the digital divide, a win for closing the homework gap, and a win for auto safety. The addition of 45 MHz of unlicensed spectrum will create a WiFi channel capable of supporting WiFi 6. This will enable wireless providers to dramatically increase the speed and reliability of rural broadband. It will dramatically increase the power of public hotspots and mobile hotspots on which many low-income families rely for access to school and work during the pandemic. Because this relies on already existing technology, the expansion and change to WiFi 6 can happen relatively quickly through software upgrades once the rules become effective. 

“In addition, the FCC will phase out the outmoded vehicle communication technology selected as the standard 20 years ago and will phase in a modern, more efficient technology requiring substantially less spectrum for collision avoidance and safety. The FCC has quite properly denied the auto industry desire to repurpose the excess spectrum for infotainment, behavioral advertising, and other commercial purposes that rely on collecting more and more of the public’s personal data and information. The auto industry should not be allowed to commercialize spectrum intended for public safety — especially when doing so would come at the expense of tens of millions of Americans on the wrong side of the digital divide and the homework gap.”

1 Part COVID Plus 1 Part Trump Fatigue Equals………

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The motion to end debate on gold-standard whack job Judy Shelton failing today.

Charles Grassley is out, having tested positive for Covid-19, and Rick “Bat-Boy” Scott was quarantining after having been exposed to someone who tested positive, so there were not enough votes to approve her:

Judy Shelton’s nomination to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors was blocked in the Senate on Tuesday, with bipartisan opposition to the controversial economist and GOP absences prompted by the coronavirus imperiling her candidacy.

The vote had been expected to be razor-thin for Shelton, who was nominated by President Trump despite her past criticism of the central bank and her unorthodox views of monetary policy. But after the vote was scheduled, two Republicans, Sens. Rick Scott (Fla.) and Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), announced they were quarantining themselves after being exposed to the coronavirus and could not attend. (Grassley on Tuesday evening announced he had tested positive for the virus.) Two Republican senators voted against advancing Shelton on Tuesday; a third GOP senator who does not support her, Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), was not in attendance for the vote Tuesday.

The last-minute shifts proved too much for Republicans to overcome, at least for now. Although the GOP holds 53 seats in the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was able to muster only 48 Republican senators to end the filibuster on Shelton’s nomination. In the end, he voted against moving the nomination forward as well, a procedural move that allows him to bring up Shelton’s nomination at a later time.

………

Apart from Lael Brainard, Trump has put every other Fed governor in his or her current post. But the seven-seat board has been operating with two vacancies for a few years, and Trump has struggled to get his final nominees through. In 2019, two of Trump’s picks, Stephen Moore and Herman Cain, withdrew their bids after intense scrutiny for their past remarks and views about women jeopardized their chances at confirmation.

Oh, right.  Nominating someone whose qualifications for the position was that he ran a pizza chain.  I remember that now.

Shelton’s nomination was particularly controversial given her calls for a return to the gold standard, which the nation fully abandoned in 1971. She advised Trump’s 2016 presidential run and has been outspoken against the Fed as an institution. She also was criticized for altering some of her views to appear in closer agreement with Trump’s aggressive push for lower interest rates, which some senators worried would insert politics into Fed decisions.

………

Underscoring how critical every Republican vote will be in the waning weeks of this year, McConnell urged senators during a private party lunch Tuesday to be careful and healthy so the GOP-controlled majority can finish work that remains to be done, such as confirming nominees to the circuit courts, according to three people directly familiar with his closed-door remarks.

Am I a bad person for hoping that the chef at this party was brewing a case of Coronavirus, and coughed all over the food?

In perhaps an indication of the Republicans’ middling enthusiasm for Shelton, no GOP senators spoke on the Senate floor in favor of her nomination on Monday or as of Tuesday afternoon. McConnell praised the slate of judicial nominees that the Senate was on track to confirm, but said nothing about Shelton directly.

His counterpart, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), was not as tight-lipped.

“Judy Shelton is not only unqualified for the job; she is a threat to our economic recovery and doesn’t belong on the Fed,” Schumer said Tuesday. “And thanks to the bipartisan coalition that opposed her nomination today, she isn’t any closer to being there.”

The election is over, Trump has the attention span of a gnat on a meth binge, and the business elites are not impressed by Shelton.

It’s no surprise that the Republicans are not going to the wall for this one.

I Just Had a Real Political Insight

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I was in an online discussion today about the inaccuracy of the polls, and I noted that one of the issues is that people are no longer answering their phones because of the deluge of robocalls.

And then I made the throw away line:

If Donald Trump Has Promised to Nuke Bangalore to End the Spam Calls, He Would Have Won 48 States.

I just realized that there is a real and deep truth, and I made the point by accident.  (Which is probably the only way that I could find a deep insight, I’m kind of shallow.)

Also:  If a presidential candidate promises to crack down on robocalls, they will top 400 electoral votes.

Screwing the Poor as He Leaves

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Just days after losing the election, the Trump administration has come up with a new way to f%$# immigrants.

They froze the wages of H2A agricultural workers on November 5:

After the last polls closed, but before the final votes had been tallied, Donald Trump’s administration quietly issued a rule to help corporate interests deny pay hikes to frontline farmworkers who help maintain America’s food supply. The rule follows a Trump administration report forecasting a steep rise in agribusiness profits.

On Nov. 5, the Department of Labor (DOL) published a rule to freeze wages for farmworkers who are working under H-2A visas until 2023. The H-2A visa program allows foreign farmworkers to access temporary visas to work in the United States for approved employers.

The American Farm Bureau Federation, the agriculture industry’s major lobbying group, welcomed the new rule, saying it provides “stability during the uncertainty created by the pandemic and trade imbalances.”

Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue praised the wage freezes in a press release: “This rule shows once again President Trump’s commitment to America’s farmers by delivering lower costs when they need it the most.” He added that, “Over the past several years farm wages have increased at a higher pace than other industries, which is why this DOL rule could not come at a better time.”

The move to slash workers’ wages follows Perdue’s department in September reporting that “net farm income, a broad measure of profits, is forecast to increase $19 billion (22.7 percent) from 2019 to $102.7 billion in 2020.”

Perdue is personally invested in agribusiness, and watchdog groups recently demanded the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspector general investigate whether Perdue violated the ethics agreement he signed when he joined the Trump administration.

For them, it’s a double win:  They get to hurt immigrants and the poors at the same time. 

I cannot wait for January 20.

This is Actually a Good Idea

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Which is the last thing that I would expect from Trump and Evil Minions™, but the proposal to award H1B visas on the basis of highest salary first, instead of doing so through a lottery.

My idea was to go through a lottery process, but this is also an elegant solution to the problem, assuming that the Indian body shops don’t manage to incorporate kick-backs into their recruiting.

I still favor a bid process for H1B applications though:

The Trump administration has proposed changes to the H-1B visa that will see it abolish the current lottery process and instead prioritise highly paid workers.

“Modifying the H-1B cap selection process by replacing the random selection process with a wage-level-based selection process is a better way to allocate H-1Bs when demand exceeds supply,” says a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announcement of the proposed policy.

“If finalized as proposed, this new selection process would incentivize employers to offer higher wages or petition for positions requiring higher skills and higher-skilled workers instead of using the program to fill relatively lower-paid vacancies.”

………

“The H-1B program is often exploited and abused by U.S. employers, and their U.S. clients, primarily seeking to hire foreign workers and pay lower wages,” said Acting DHS Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli. “The current use of random selection to allocate H-1B visas …. fails to leverage the H-1B program to truly compete for the world’s best and brightest, and hurts American workers by bringing in relatively lower-paid foreign labor at the expense of the American workforce.”

………

The document also suggests that economic benefits could possibly include:

  • A better chance of attracting skilled and highly paid workers to apply for the H-1B, plus the prospect of higher wages for visa applicants because paying them more would rank them more highly as visa applicants;
  • Increased job opportunities for lower-skilled US workers who would otherwise have to compete with H-1B visa-holder;
  • Increased wages for H-1B recipients whose earnings fall into middling earning bands.

This appears to actually be an well thought out and thoughtful policy.

I credit a few million monkeys chained to typewriters.

I Hope That They Take Uber to the Cleaners

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Uber drivers in the EU are suing the Gypsy cab company for firing them via algorithm, which violates the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) because the company fires drivers by algorithm.

The Europeans, and most of the rest of the world, are far less interested in buying the ride-hailing company’s “Because ……… Internet” crap:

Four Uber drivers in the UK and Portugal who claim they were dismissed unfairly by the company’s anti-fraud algorithm have challenged their account deactivations in a European court, citing GDPR protections against automated decision making.

The App Drivers & Couriers Union, a UK-based worker advocacy group, filed a legal complaint on Monday in a district court in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on behalf of the dismissed drivers.

“Uber has been allowed to violate employment law with impunity for years and now we are seeing a glimpse into an Orwellian world of work where workers have no rights and are managed by machine,” said Yaseen Aslam, President of the App Drivers & Couriers Union, in a statement. “If Uber is not checked, this practice will become the norm for everyone.”

Anton Ekker, the attorney representing the four former drivers – three from the UK and one from Portugal – said in a statement that the case represents the first challenge under the GDPR to automated decisions affecting the estimated 3.9m Uber drivers worldwide.

Article 22 of the GDPR states individuals “have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.”

I really hope that Uber gets nailed to the wall on this.

It’s Bank Failure Friday!!! (On Sunday)

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We now have the 4th bank failure of the year, just 1 week after the the 3rd bank failure, this time it’s the Almena State Bank of Almena, KS.

So, we now have as many commercial bank failures in 2020 as we did in 2019.

I can’t help but think that there was some regulatory forbearance going on for electoral advantage, and that now that the election is just over a week away, the political appointees are too busy updating their resumes to worry about this.

Full FDIC list

It’s Bank Failure Friday!!!

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After an almost 6 month hiatus, we have the 3rd bank failure of the year, First City Bank of Florida, of Fort Walton Beach FL.

I’m not sure if it means anything, except the obvious that the economy is beginning to hit the banks.

It may be the first of a few, or the first of a tsunami.  No clue as to which one.

By way of context here is the Full FDIC list going back a number of years.

Still not at a number where graphing makes sense though.

OK, This Looks Like a Semi Serious Proposal

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Antitrust regulators are looking forcing Google to sell its chrome browser as well as parts of its advertising network.

This is a good start.

What also should be applied is the remove the special stock that gives the founders outsize voting rights.

Many of the anti-competitive behaviors flow from the belief of their founders that they are supermen beyond the limitations of mortal men, and so they need not concern themselves with the rules.

See Neumann at WeWork, Zuckerberg at Facebook, and Musk at ……… well ……… everything, as well as Page and Brin at Google.

What’s more, the recompense for the loss of these voting rights would be small, so you can do it on the cheap.

Also, prohibit any corporate acquisitions by these companies.  

As was the case with Facebook and Instagram, this was a purchase happened because Facebook was relentlessly tracking its users, and came to see it as a threat:

Regulators are considering a breakup of the Google empire, including a forced sale of its dominant web browser Google Chrome and certain aspects of its ad-tech stack.

A Politico report cites several sources with knowledge of the discussions taking place as the U.S. Department of Justice and several state attorneys general prepare to file suit against the online behemoth.

Official proceedings are expected to take place within weeks, following months of speculation over how government officials intend to rein in Google’s dominance of the $130 billion a year online advertising business—of which Google controls 37.2%.

Google Chrome commands a 66.3% share of the global web browser market, according to GlobalStats. Its ad stack, popularly referred to as DoubleClick, comprises both buy- and sell-side tools as well as its dominant ad-serving tool.

This set of tools, as well as Google’s “closed” operating model, has prompted many to accuse Google of exerting undue control over all aspects of the online advertising market (see video below), and its 2015 decision to block third-party ad-buying tools from purchasing ad space on YouTube was widely criticized.

………


The latest media reports come within a week of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust publishing a 449-page report roundly criticizing Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.

Among the recommendations in the report were that authorities impose “structural separations,” either by way of a forced sale of certain parts of each company’s assets or assurances parts of their businesses are firewalled. Other recommendations included rules to prevent “self-preferencing,” plus the promotion of “interoperability” with third parties and an overhaul of M&A laws.

………

Speaking at Adweek’s virtual NexTech conference on the same day the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google were appearing before the congressional subcommittee behind last week’s report, NYU professor Scott Galloway said, “They need to be broken up.”

Facebook is Ineluctably Evil

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On a company discussion board, a Facebook employee noted that senior management had repeatedly reversed decisions to flag conservative groups and media for posting false and deceptive information, and  was promptly fired. 

So much for social media having a liberal bias.

Also, this should be a lesson for the Dems:  Oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg care about nothing but themselves.  They are not to be trusted.

Seeing as how the US has not done what Yeltsin did when he selected his oligarchs, he overwhelmingly selected them from a despised minority, Jews, so that he would have public support if he needed to take them down.  (He didn’t, but Putin did.)

Break up Facebook:

After months of debate and disagreement over the handling of inflammatory or misleading posts from Donald Trump, Facebook employees want CEO Mark Zuckerberg to explain what the company would do if the leader of the free world uses the social network to undermine the results of the 2020 US presidential election.

“I do think we’re headed for a problematic scenario where Facebook is going to be used to aggressively undermine the legitimacy of the US elections, in a way that has never been possible in history,” one Facebook employee wrote in a group on Workplace, the company’s internal communication platform, earlier this week.

For the past week, this scenario has been a topic of heated discussion inside Facebook and was a top question for its leader. Some 2,900 employees asked Zuckerberg to address it publicly during a company-wide meeting on Thursday, which he partly did, calling it “an unprecedented position.”

………

While there are signs Facebook will stand up to Trump in cases where he violates its rules — as on Wednesday when it removed a video post from the president in which he claimed that children are “almost immune” to COVID-19 — there are others who suggest the company is caving to critical voices on the right. In another recent Workplace post, a senior engineer collected internal evidence that showed Facebook was giving preferential treatment to prominent conservative accounts to help them remove fact-checks from their content.

The company responded by removing his post and restricting internal access to the information he cited. On Wednesday the engineer was fired, according to internal posts seen by BuzzFeed News.

………

Last Friday, at another all-hands meeting, employees asked Zuckerberg how right-wing publication Breitbart News could remain a Facebook News partner after sharing a video that promoted unproven treatments and said masks were unnecessary to combat the novel coronavirus. The video racked up 14 million views in six hours before it was removed from Breitbart’s page, though other accounts continued to share it.

Zuckerberg danced around the question but did note that Breitbart could be removed from the company’s news tab if it were to receive two strikes for publishing misinformation within 90 days of each other. (Facebook News partners, which include dozens of publications such as BuzzFeed News and the Washington Post, receive compensation and placement in a special news tab on the social network.)

………

But some of Facebook’s own employees gathered evidence they say shows Breitbart — along with other right-wing outlets and figures including Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, Trump supporters Diamond and Silk, and conservative video production nonprofit Prager University — has received special treatment that helped it avoid running afoul of company policy. They see it as part of a pattern of preferential treatment for right-wing publishers and pages, many of which have alleged that the social network is biased against conservatives.

………

On July 22, a Facebook employee posted a message to the company’s internal misinformation policy group noting that some misinformation strikes against Breitbart had been cleared by someone at Facebook seemingly acting on the publication’s behalf.

“A Breitbart escalation marked ‘urgent: end of day’ was resolved on the same day, with all misinformation strikes against Breitbart’s page and against their domain cleared without explanation,” the employee wrote.

The same employee said a partly false rating applied to an Instagram post from Charlie Kirk was flagged for “priority” escalation by Joel Kaplan, the company’s vice president of global public policy. Kaplan once served in George W. Bush’s administration and drew criticism for publicly supporting Brett Kavanaugh’s controversial nomination to the Supreme Court.

………

Past Facebook employees, including Yaël Eisenstat, Facebook’s former global election ads integrity lead, have expressed concerns with Kaplan’s influence over content enforcement decisions. She previously told BuzzFeed News a member of Kaplan’s Washington policy team attempted to influence ad enforcement decisions for an ad placed by a conservative organization.

Facebook did not respond to questions about why Kaplan would personally intervene in matters like this.

………

“It appears that policy people have been intervening in fact-checks on behalf of *exclusively* right-wing publishers, to avoid them getting repeat-offender status,” wrote another employee in the company’s internal “misinformation policy” discussion group.

Individuals that spoke out about the apparent special treatment of right-wing pages have also faced consequences. In one case, a senior Facebook engineer collected multiple instances of conservative figures receiving unique help from Facebook employees, including those on the policy team, to remove fact-checks on their content. His July post was removed because it violated the company’s “respectful communication policy.”

Bullsh%$.

Zuckerberg has absolute authority over Facebook, and Joel Kaplan is his guy, and has no authority beyond what Zuckerberg gives him.

Psychopaths like Mark Zuckerberg is why anti-trust law was created.

Finally!

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From Friday to now, over $150,000 in fines from 62 summonses were handed out by City agents in the Red, Orange and Yellow zones, including 5 to non-compliant religious congregations.

— City of New York (@nycgov) October 11, 2020

New York is finally enforcing tanctions against people who violate social distancing and mask mandates.

Notably, this includes members of New York’s Ultra-orthodox Jewish community, who have been been notorious for ignoring rules against mass gatherings.

I get that these communities have a lot of political pull, but their reckless behavior needs to be checked:

Authorities cracked down this weekend on some of the city’s coronavirus hot spots, issuing more than 60 summonses and tens of thousands of dollars in fines to people, businesses and houses of worship that did not follow newly imposed restrictions on gatherings or mask-wearing and social-distancing requirements.

Among those issued a summons by the New York City sheriff were a restaurant and at least five houses of worship in the city’s “red zones,” where coronavirus infection rates are the highest. Each of those locations was given a summons that could result in up to $15,000 in fines, said Sheriff Joseph Fucito.

That means some of these were synagogues.

There are certain things that only can be done in a group in Jewish worship, but you only need 10 people, a minyan, to do that.  You don’t need 200 crammed together in a synagogue, it can be 10 folks in a living room.

In total, officials issued 62 tickets and more than $150,000 in fines during the first weekend the new restrictions were in effect, the New York City government Twitter account said on Sunday.

The city is wrestling with its most acute pandemic crisis since the virus first swept through the five boroughs in March. Since mid-August, city and state officials say large gatherings and lax social distancing have caused a surge in new cases in pockets of Brooklyn and Queens, many of them in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods. The spike prompted Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to issue new restrictions on large gatherings and nonessential businesses in certain parts of the city.

………

One of the Orthodox Jewish men who led protests against the restrictions, Heshy Tischler, was taken into custody by the police department’s warrants squad Sunday night, a police official said. Mr. Tischler, a talk radio personality, is expected to be charged with inciting a riot and unlawful imprisonment in connection with an incident in Borough Park, Brooklyn, last week in which a Jewish journalist, Jacob Kornbluh, was attacked by a crowd during a protest.

The sense of entitlement in this community is mind boggling.

Jews are supposed to be a light unto the nations, not a group of self-important thugs.

Him I Want to Die in Poverty and Struggling to Breath

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He’s killed dozens, if not hundreds of minors with out a second thought, so I’m hoping that he gets turned down:

Robert E. Murray, the former CEO and president of the now-bankrupt Murray Energy, has filed an application with the U.S. Department of Labor for black lung benefits. For years, Murray and his company fought against federal mine safety regulations aimed at reducing the debilitating disease.

“I founded the company and created 8,000 jobs there until the move to end coal use. I am still chairman of the board,” he wrote on a Labor Department form that initiated his claim obtained by the Ohio Valley ReSource. “We’re in bankruptcy, and due to my health could not handle the president and CEO job any longer.”

According to sources, Murray’s claim is still in the initial stages and is being evaluated to determine the party potentially responsible for paying out the associated benefits. The Labor Department is required to determine a liable party before an initial ruling can be made on entitlement to benefits. If Murray’s claim were to go before an administrative law judge, some aspects of the claim would become a matter of public record.

………

Reached by phone, Murray declined an on-the-record interview for this story. Murray said he has black lung from working in underground mines and is entitled to benefits. Additionally, he disputed that he ever fought against regulations to quell the disease or fought miners from receiving benefits.

Murray also threatened to file a lawsuit if a story was published that indicated he had fought federal regulations and benefits.

Of course he threatened a lawsuit.  It’s what the Dr. Evil wannabee does, and it’s what led John Oliver to go after him hammer and tongs.

But Murray told NPR in October 2019 that he had a lung disease that was not caused by working underground in mines.

“It’s idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. IPF, and it is not related to my work in the industry. They’ve checked for that,” Murray told NPR. “And it’s not — has anything to do with working in the coal mines, which I did for 17 years underground every day. And until I was 76, I went underground twice a week.”

I’m thinking of starting a Gofundme to pay for a guy in a squirrel suit to follow Bob Murray around telling him to eat sh%$.

The Root of Currency is “Current”, and Cryptocurrency Isn’t

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That’s why a court has ruled that a $100 million initial crypto coin offering (ICO) by Kin was an illegal unregistered securities sale.

When all is said and done, currency is supposed to allow one to spend a store of value on goods and services essentially instantly.

Even the most established crypto-currency, Bitcoin, takes hours, if not days, to process a transaction.
It is not a meaningful medium of exchange for even the most basic commercial activities:

The 2017 launch of the Kin cryptocurrency broke federal securities laws, a federal judge has ruled. Federal law requires anyone who offers a new security to the general public to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The messaging app maker Kik didn’t do that when it sold $100 million worth of Kin in 2017.

The company argued that Kin was legally a new virtual currency, not a security. In a Wednesday ruling, Judge Alvin Hellerstein rejected that claim. The ruling could have big consequences for the cryptocurrency world.

Since 2016, hundreds of cryptocurrency projects have held Kin-like “initial coin offerings” that raised millions—in a few cases, hundreds of millions—of dollars. Few of these offerings went through the traditional steps required to register a securities offering with the SEC. So Wednesday’s ruling could create legal headaches for existing blockchain projects launched via an ICO. It also limits the options for launching cryptocurrencies in the future.

Judge Hellerstein gave Kik and the SEC three weeks to come up with a joint recommendation on appropriate remedies. Kik says it is considering appealing the ruling.
How a cryptocurrency offering is like an orange grove

A security is an asset that investors purchase in hopes of making a profit. It includes traditional investment vehicles like stocks and bonds, but it also includes a catch-all category called an investment contract. The Supreme Court laid out the legal criteria for investment contracts in a landmark 1946 ruling.

………

In his Wednesday ruling, Hellerstein concluded that similar logic applies to the Kin tokens Kik sold in 2017. Officially, Kin owners are not entitled to any profits generated by the Kin ecosystem. But practically speaking, people bought Kin because they hoped a thriving Kin ecosystem would push up Kin’s value the same way that bitcoins and ether had become more valuable over time.

Hellerstein notes that Kik CEO Ted Livingston repeatedly touted Kin’s potential as an investment opportunity. “If you could grow the demand for it, then the price—the value of that cryptocurrency would go up, such that if you set some aside for yourself at the beginning, you could make a lot of money,” Livingston said.

………

This was a common way to bootstrap a new cryptocurrency during the 2017 ICO boom, and the Kik ruling could slam the door shut on this method for getting a new blockchain project off the ground. Registering as a security comes with a lot of regulations. Complying with those regulations will, at a minimum, require a lot of legal work. And some cryptocurrency projects might not fit into existing SEC rules at all.

This is a good thing.

ICO’s are a recipe for fraud.

So Not a Surprise

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Is anyone surprised that U.S. tech firms are refusing to obey EU data transfer regulations? 

Criminality is an integral part of the Silicon Valley ethos.  That’s what, “Move Fast and Break Things,” means.

Technology firms’ compliance with European restrictions on transatlantic data transfers is shockingly poor, Austrian privacy campaigner Max Schrems said on Monday, publishing a survey here of companies including Facebook and Netflix.

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled in July that the data arrangement set up in 2016, called Privacy Shield, was invalid under Europe’s privacy framework because of concerns about U.S. surveillance.

………

Exercising the right of customers to ask companies how their data is handled under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the survey drew a mixed bag of responses – some firms did not respond and others gave misleading answers.

………

“Overall, we were astonished by how many companies were unable to provide little more than a boilerplate answer,” said Schrems.

“The companies that did provide answers largely are simply not complying with the CJEU judgment. It seems that most of the industry still does not have a plan as to how to move forward.”

This IS their plan for moving forward:  Break the law and force the EU to go after them.

Until assets are seized, or executives are arrested, the lawbreaking will continue.

Headline of the Day

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Banks’ Airtight Compliance Procedure Involves Laundering Money, Sending Report That Won’t Be Read, Collecting Fees, Laughing All The Way Back To Themselves

—Dealbreaker

To be fair, the story was broken by Buzzfeed, but they don’t have the same attitude as Dealbreaker.

A huge trove of secret government documents reveals for the first time how the giants of Western banking move trillions of dollars in suspicious transactions, enriching themselves and their shareholders while facilitating the work of terrorists, kleptocrats, and drug kingpins.

And the US government, despite its vast powers, fails to stop it.

Today, the FinCEN Files — thousands of “suspicious activity reports” and other US government documents — offer an unprecedented view of global financial corruption, the banks enabling it, and the government agencies that watch as it flourishes. BuzzFeed News has shared these reports with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and more than 100 news organizations in 88 countries.

These documents, compiled by banks, shared with the government, but kept from public view, expose the hollowness of banking safeguards, and the ease with which criminals have exploited them. Profits from deadly drug wars, fortunes embezzled from developing countries, and hard-earned savings stolen in a Ponzi scheme were all allowed to flow into and out of these financial institutions, despite warnings from the banks’ own employees.
Laws that were meant to stop financial crime have instead allowed it to flourish. So long as a bank files a notice that it may be facilitating criminal activity, it all but immunizes itself and its executives from criminal prosecution. The suspicious activity alert effectively gives them a free pass to keep moving the money and collecting the fees.

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But the FinCEN Files investigation shows that even after they were prosecuted or fined for financial misconduct, banks such as JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank, and Bank of New York Mellon continued to move money for suspected criminals.

This information should be routinely made public.

Name and shame the oligarchs and those who help them to launder their money.

House Passes Bill to Regulate the Internet of Sh%$

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Given that our f%$#ing light bulbs are being hijacked to DDOS Instagram influencers, legislation to regulate the so-called “Internet of Things” is long overdue:

Though it doesn’t grab the same headline attention as the silly and pointless TikTok ban, the lack of security and privacy standards in the internet of things (IOT) is arguably a much bigger problem. TikTok is, after all, just one app, hoovering up consumer data in a way that’s not particularly different from the 45,000 other international apps, services, governments, and telecoms doing much the same thing. The IOT, in contrast, involves millions of feebly secured products being attached to home and business networks every day. Many also made in China, but featuring microphones and cameras.

Thanks to a laundry list of lazy companies, everything from your Barbie doll to your tea kettle is now hackable. Worse, these devices are now being quickly incorporated into some of the largest botnets ever built, resulting in devastating and historic DDoS attacks. In short: thanks to “internet of things” companies that prioritized profits over consumer privacy and the safety of the internet, we’re now facing a security and privacy dumpster fire that many experts believe will, sooner or later, result in some notably nasty results.

To that end, the House this week finally passed the Internet of Things Cybersecurity Improvement Act, which should finally bring some meaningful privacy and security standards to the internet of things (IOT). Cory Gardner, Mark Warner, and other lawmakers note the bill creates some baseline standards for security and privacy that must be consistently updated (what a novel idea), while prohibiting government agencies from using gear that doesn’t pass muster. It also includes some transparency requirements mandating that any vulnerabilities in IOT hardware are disseminated among agencies and the public quickly:

I would suggest some additional requirements, like length of support requirements, and liability for the manufacturers and/or vendors.

Remember that Strike Busting Vegan Meat Company?

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Well, the NLRB has filed a complaint against them for firing union organizers.

Considering the fact that this is the Trump National Labor Relations Board, the ironically named No Evil Foods (I wrote about them previously here) had to be pretty egregiously over the line:

Earlier this year, the vegan meat company No Evil Foods—which sells socialist-branded products at 5,500 grocery stores nationwide, including Whole Foods—fired two production workers at its Weaverville, North Carolina production plant who led a union drive at the company and circulated a petition asking for hazard pay during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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This week, the National Labor Review Board (NLRB) found merit that the company illegally terminated the two workers, an NLRB spokesperson confirmed to Motherboard. According to a federal complaint issued Wednesday and obtained by Motherboard, the company violated the law by firing workers because they “assisted a union” and “circulat[ed] a petition seeking hazard pay…for the purposes of mutual aid and protection.”

Under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, it is illegal for employers to discriminate or retaliate against workers for organizing coworkers to improve their working conditions or for attempting to form unions.

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On Wednesday, the NLRB issued a federal complaint against No Evil Foods, alleging the company violated the NLRA by “interfering with, restraining, and coercing employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed.” According to the complaint, on April 1, 2020, a No Evil Foods HR manager interrogated employees about their union organizing and the petition for hazard pay, creating the impression management was “surveilling employees” by telling them they knew who had circulated the petition in the parking lot outside the production plant.

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The firing of the two union organizers fits within an ongoing trend of ostensibly progressive companies like Kickstarter and Whole Foods taking anti-union stances when employees seek to improve their working conditions.

Jon Reynolds, the other fired No Evil Foods production worker, told Motherboard, “part of what helped us is that we kept notes, and documented and recorded everything. Throughout the unionization process, we amassed as much evidence as possible [that No Evil Foods was against our union].”

Note to would be labor organizers: DOCUMENT EVERYTHING.

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Following a series of compulsory anti-union meetings led by management, workers voted against joining the United Food and Commercial Workers union in a landslide 43-15 vote in February.

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A spokesperson for the National Labor Review Board says that a trial for No Evil Foods has been scheduled for December 7.

“The finding that our case had merit is a cause for any worker anywhere to see that there is an actual law that allows people to organize without fear of retaliation,” said Roche, the fired No Evil Foods worker. “Companies that fire people who organize aren’t on the right side of history. “

I really hope that the hypocrites at No Evil Foods get what’s coming to them.